Well, no games today

Lordy. It's a fifth Saturday (or was a few hours ago), and I called a few people to see if there was any gaming going on anywhere in all the scattered spheres of the multiverse.

Sooo, that didn't go anywhere:

-Kevin is out of state and well-nigh out of pocket, though he pointed me in Amy and RJ's direction.
-RJ had already tried to arrange a wargame, ran out of steam, and was basically just puttering around.
-Amy was not at home and I left her a message.

At that point, I was enlightened. "Huh, guess I should have organized a party at the clubhouse like Lee suggested a month ago, then I'd be all set and ROLLING AROUND in boardgaming!"

I gave up and read library books and cleaned up around the house. Oh, and then had to get up at 3 am to monitor some work stuff.

Bleah.

Thursday Night Gaming: lots of people

I ended up getting Crystal, Michael, Tim, and Timothy from work, along with Chris Belfi, Timothy's wife Jackie, and Crystal's friend Teko, over for gaming.

Lee joined us for 6 Takes and Apples to Apples. Both are pretty goofy, random, and involve simultaneous play, which is good for 9 players at the same table.

Crystal, Michael, and Teko headed out for food, Tim decided to crash, and Lee decided to advance the laundry, leaving Chris, Timothy, Jackie, and I to play Alhambra.

I like Alhambra. It's a shopping-and-building game, and is fairly easy to learn. Chris brought it over along with some other stuff; he also returned my copies of Modern Art and Citadels.

The evening went a little too late, but everyone had fun and so I'll count it as a success.

Gamecount: Individual game sessions played for the year = 74, New game titles played for the year = 15.

Stonyfield Farms website: good coupons, hilarious javascript

Stonyfield Farms has some introductory coupons (50 and 75 cents off on many of their products) at their website. It is the only flavored whole milk organic yogurt available, which is perfect for our skinny toddler.

In the source on one page, the following comment is visible (funny part bolded):


/ this next line is throwing an error. It is how I found it. It's missing the var name.
/ I'm going to guess
/ document.location.href = "install.cfm?ID=" + ID;


Their site also prevents you from printing the introductory coupons twice. One speculates that given the presence of humorous Javascript, there could potentially be a way to print the coupons more than once. I am, ahem, just sayin'...

The moral of the story: a 6-pack of the yogurt costs $2.75 at HEB, and costs $3.50 at Whole Foods, sometimes called Whole Paycheck. However, our HEB only carries one flavor, and the Whole Foods carries all the flavors. Where is Seth Godin when you really need him?

Sunday night update

As I dropped off Lee and the girls at church, Larry came by, as previously arranged. We had a catch-up session since he's been traveling quite a bit.

After that, we got in two games of Attika. I won the first, he won the second. Both good games, probably in an hour or 1:10 total. Great stuff, and I'm still interested in it.

My gamecount for the year is about 40 behind, and my new titles for the year is in trouble, too. I'll either have to kick the gaming up a notch, or declare 2007 also part of 2006.

I can do that. I'm the decider. (Sorry, paid $2.82 a gallon to fill up both cars this weekend, and am a little snarky about it. Weak president, oil crisis, problems in Iran. Huh, is it 1978 again already?)

Gamecount: Individual game sessions played for the year = 71, New game titles played for the year = 15.

Multiplayer Magic Wednesday

Sweet. Tim and Timothy came over and we played a bunch of Magic. It was cool. It looks like we may switch to board games next week! Since Lee is not interested in learning to play Magic, that would give her an opportunity to join in on the fun.

I'm counting this night as 2 games (representing 3 games of 2-player and 3 games of 3-player Magic).
Gamecount: Individual game sessions played for the year = 69, New game titles played for the year = 15.

Firefox 1.5.0.2 leaks memory

Shoot. I had Firefox configured to cache fewer tabs and pages, and that made it work great. After running the update it requested and going to version 1.5.0.2, it is leaking memory.

I typically leave my computer running all night (behind hardware firewall, etc.) and doing this with Firefox open has made me find Firefox gleefully eating 450 Mb or more of ram in the morning.

Bleah. I downloaded the new version of Flash, as it is apparent from watching the Task Manager that Flash animations are hogging memory.

Guys like Jesse Ruderman point out some possible causes and corrections. Interesting/boring...

On one hand, I could fix it by falling back a notch. Or go forward to a newer build that's got fixes in it.

Catch-up post 1: Attika on Sunday

Larry met me up at the church after I dropped the girls off in the preschool.

We got in three more games of Attika (he won 2).

Still enjoying it.

Gamecount: Individual game sessions played for the year = 67, New game titles played for the year = 15.

Alex has a wish list!

Alexis is about to turn two.


Her wish list includes:

• Washable markers
• blank pads of drawing paper
• side-walk chalk
• size 2T shirts
  

Alex has enough of these and does not need:

• coloring books with pre-printed pictures
• shorts or pants

Saturday: not bad at all

Lee and I took the girls to the Jersey Village Founders' Days festival. There was a petting zoo and a frisbee dogs contest.

We weren't there long, because Lee had a music survey that KSBJ wanted her to do. We drove home, and got Alexis down for her nap.

My friend Larry came over and I taught him how to play my new copy of Attika. I'd link to the boardgamegeek page, but it appears to be down...

Cori didn't want to go to sleep, and after running down the usual list, I smeared teething gel on a finger and found her first tooth poking up through her bottom gumline. Properly dosed, she fell asleep in Larry's arms.

We managed to get in three games in between feeding Alexis after her nap, and so on.

Gamecount: Individual game sessions played for the year = 64, New game titles played for the year = 15.

Wednesday night Magic

Tim came over, as well as fellow work friends Crystal and Timothy. We played two games of multiplayer Magic.

It was cool and the decks were all reasonable without being degenerate. I won one game and Tim won the other; Timothy was playing a tricky deck that Crystal had brought.

This bodes well for the future of having more people from work over.

Gamecount: Individual game sessions played for the year = 61, New game titles played for the year = 15.

Router troubles

Yay, our router is dead. Bleah. In my big pile of scavenged/old stuff, I have a DSL modem/router and a hub. I couldn't get the DSL router to do anything, and since a hub would only tempt us to run with no firewall, that's out, too.

Crud. Not sure if we'll go wired, wireless, or a combination this time around.

Adobe knows where the pooch is; that is because they harbor carnal desires for it

Lee finally allowed Adobe Acrobat to update on her computer. The updater did the following:

• nagged her repeatedly until she updated.
  
• put icons for more crappy programs on her desktop without permission.
• required multiple reboots to stop complaining.
• broke her scanner.
  
• set up crappy update services that autolaunched and consumed way too much memory
• caused hard drive thrashing upon start-up.

The scanner problem had me worried, and I'm not 100% certain how I fixed it.

Seriously, you guys. You make software to read PDFs. We use our computers to read PDFs about .4% of the time. The other 99.6% of the time, not so much. Stop the madness!

Summary of weekend

Friday: Lee and I dropped the girls off up at the church for Parents' Night Out, went to Bennigan's, then returned to the church and played Ticket To Ride.

Gamecount: Individual game sessions played for the year = 60, New game titles played for the year = 15.

Saturday: Lee and I get up, put the girls in the Subaru, and drive to Louisiana to hang out with her relatives.

Sunday: Lee and I get up, are disoriented from the time change, check out of the motel, and drive back to Houston.

After we got the girls to bed, I took an anti-static bag full of video cards over to Larry's new apartment and caught him up on the events of the week. As it happened, Larry determined his motherboard was toast (no tears, it's backed up via a NAS), and didn't need the video cards anyway. Larry also talked to me about dynamic DNS web-stuff, name registering services, and a little about Wordpress.

Larry's my go-to guy on almost any technical subject. This is not only because he dives head-first into complicated topics, but he is good at seeing the too-far point for his audience. When I ask him for advice, he's careful to outline what the best angles of attack are. He understands the idea of cost-benefit ratios, and can deftly draw the line between "hey, this is fairly simple," "This is a little tricky, but you're a smart guy," and "Oh, dude, this is only for gearheads and even then, not worth the effort."